TruckWidth
Long promised, often hyped, and undelivered, true Video-on-Demand may finally be coming. Imagine every TV show, available all of the time, living in the cable network, awaiting your request. Maybe this time's for real -- churn amongst digital subscribers is up to a murderous 5% per month, the DBS threat looms large, and the cable MSOs have seen that if they don't give the masses what they want, well, the masses will just take it for themselves.
Most bleeding-edge video consumers already have two VoD tools in their arsenal. NetFlix has become for many people (1.15 million at last count) the main source of video entertainment, and for some the only one. Tivo has entered the life of millions, and once experienced, a DVR is not something given up lightly.
The cable companies talked for a decade about providing choice. Satellites were launched, fiber was laid, and cable plant was built. Meanwhile, smart entrepreneurs used the bandwidth inherent in a speeding US Postal Service truck to deliver video.
Consider the fortunate subscriber who lives relatively near one of the large NetFlix processing centers. With an expected delivery time of one day, he can order a DVD and have it on his doorstep within 24 hours. A double-sided DVD-10 disk can thus deliver 10 GBytes of data, or nearly 1 Megabit per second to the home. It's as if Netflix put dedicated video-DSL lines into a million homes and kicked off the VoD revolution.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of DVDs speeding down the highway.
Thanks to technology entrepreneurs, the modern TV-watching home has already begun to route around the cable companies, leaving them scrambling to catch up. What other lessons are in store? Some incumbents believe that a word processor for $300 is just what Johnny wants for Christmas. Others believe that $50 is the right price for a broadband link, despite the obvious success of the low-price South Korean experiment. And there are those who would rather defend and re-sell yesteryear's product than build a better mouse(trap). Wherever there's a slow-moving incumbent trying to sell yesterday's goods at the old prices, opportunities await.
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Long promised, often hyped, and undelivered, true Video-on-Demand may finally be coming. Imagine every TV show, available all of the time, living in the cable network, awaiting your request. Maybe this time's for real -- churn amongst digital subscribe... Read More
A great post over at VentureBlog covers the cable industry, Video on Demand, and how services like Netflix and TiVo have sprung up to route around the faltering cable companies. Read More
Naval writes about TruckWidth. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck full of DVDs speeding down the highway." Yeah, Netflix is cool now, but history will record it as an intermediate technology, until broadband video services became... Read More
VentureBlog: TruckWidth Long promised, often hyped, and undelivered, true Video-on-Demand may finally be coming. Imagine every TV show, available all of the time, living in the cable network, awaiting your request. Maybe this time's for real -- churn a... Read More
Many of my friends in various markets who have cable have held on to their analog options as long as possible. Digital cable is often far worse, just as most of the non-prime DBS channels look awful. At 1mbit/sec, MPEG2 isn't even as good as VHS quality. (Maybe if the set top boxes could decode DiVX or XVID :-)
Netflix has a good system for metropolitan areas, and rural libraries are filling in for those of us living in the boonies. My local library loans out videos and DVDs. Even better, I can select the DVDs I want online, receive an email when one is available, and borrow it for one to seven weeks (you can renew if there are no other holds). What does it cost? Nothing--its free. Sorry hollywood, no revenue from me.
I wonder if distribution of movies over DSL is going anywhere in South Korea?
As a Netflix subscriber, TiVO-owner, Time-warner Cable digital subscriber (with VoD option and DVR function), I can tell you the following:
- VoD seems to trump Netflix - I have both, and our need to update Netflix all the time has gone down substantially since we started using VoD. I still like them because I like the higher quality of DVDs - but my girlfriend is the more typcial consumer and she likes VoD.
- TWC's generic DVR is as good as my TiVO about 85% of the time. Given that TiVO's rollout with DirecTV seems to be below expectations, I could see, at some point, TiVO getting killed by the likes of Scientific Atlanta.
- One of the biggest barriers to VoD that no one seems to talk about is that the studios are unlikely to improve the release schedule for VoD for fear of eating into their DVD revenue. That, in my opinion, will be the main reason why VoD takes longer to take off.
Just some thoughts...clearly, companies like DirecTV and EchoStar continue to eat cable's lunch....
While Netflix can be nice, it can't beat instant. With Time Warner Cable in NYC I am able to not only order many movies on demand but also record and time shift thanks to the new DVR cable box. Once the HD box is available, it will be hard to beat what will be installed directly in the living room.